


years since it's been clear

by portions_forfox



Category: The Beatles
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 04:05:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/617890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Paul would like to look back on the year he was fourteen and remember every day that he was fine and he was happy and he was good, and not every day that he wasn’t.</i> A study in the Beatles, philosophy, and the nature of happiness. Somebody's bound to get high along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	years since it's been clear

**Author's Note:**

> so. here it is, at last. this is the monster (though, looking at its word count alone, it isn't really a monster) i've been working on since october. it has arrived in full with only mild contusions to its author. first thing you need to know: it is not chronological. not by any stretch of the imagination. second thing you know: IT IS NOT REAL. these are lies, i'm sorry.

What you have to understand is that he was just a kid when this all started.

(He was still just a kid when it ended.

But that’s beside the point.)

 

**[January, 2000]**

George’s place is all white and green, all wide open windows, lots of light. And it’s big. God, it’s big. But the sun is golden through the windows and the air inside is warm when you step in, like it always should be, like it always is in George’s house.

Olivia’s got her arms crossed in the doorway, her ankles one over the other and her big brown eyes bared at Paul. She looks as though she’s sizing him up, and it occurs to him how funny that is, in a way—she a poor Columbian secretary, and he a multimillionaire music icon, et cetera, et cetera; but the look on her face reminds him of Mimi, and he’s fifteen again, a poor boy from the other side, the wrong side of town. She looks him up and down once more, evaluating. Then she smiles, slow curve.

“Hello, Paul,” she says. “It’s been a while.”

“It has, hasn’t it?” he responds, feather-light, tilt of the head—pretends like oh dear me just hadn’t noticed. He un-tilts his head, clears his throat. “How’s he doing?”

Olivia’s face shifts, templates beneath the skin arranging themselves into something she thinks could seem appropriate. “He’s a bit shaky,” she answers, careful choosing words, “but he’ll be all right.”

“ ’Course he will,” Paul grins. “While he’s got you around to give his assailants a good lamp ’round the head.”

Her smile breaks open wide; the careful templates dissolve, forgotten. “That’s what I’m here for.” She uncrosses her ankles and arms, squeezes his shoulder once and jerks her head. “Come along, then—he’s in here.”

The sitting room is giant, of course—there’s an round unused dining table to one side and a glass coffee table by the sofa; a piano, six or seven randomly dispersed items of furniture, tall majestic wooden rocking chairs, and then there’s George, sitting on the edge of the middle couch cushion, bent over a guitar. Bandages are round his middle. Soft music fills the room, this indiscriminate mix of new chords and old. It’s a lot to take in. 

George looks up and meets Paul’s eyes, quirks his head but doesn’t quit playing. Paul forgets that sometimes—George doesn’t get bored like John or distracted like Paul, and he likes to play alone sometimes. He’s rather the true guitarist.

“D’ya hear that?” George wonders gently, and his hands slide over the strings, long fingers, wide palms. It’s a thread of chords that rings a bell, so to speak—just the faintest tinkering of recollection deep in the quarries of Paul’s memory. It’s gone before he can really latch on. (Maybe it was just a false alarm. Supposedly those happen more with age.) “See?” George goes on, breaks off. The music disappears from thin air, and it’s like the ground’s pulled out suddenly from beneath their feet. “I can never sodding tell what’s new or what’s old these days.”

* * *

Later it’s dark outside, and there are just a few dim lights on in this giant fairy mansion—they’ve been sitting and playing and talking in this room for hours. Olivia saunters back in at around midnight as George is in the middle of a sentence and Paul’s plunking around on the piano. George cuts himself off, points, and goes, “That, play that again.”

“What?” Paul lifts his hands off the keys.

“ _That_ ,” he nearly rolls his eyes, fond, still, “that thing you just did, Paul. What is that—Little Richard? Sing it.”

Paul glances anxiously at Olivia. She’s tuned out, smiling distantly and tidying up the place; gathering books that don’t belong on coffee tables and pillows that should be sitting on beds, but he’s still hesitant.

It doesn’t go over George’s head. Glancing from Paul to Olivia, Olivia to Paul, he smiles. “Oh, that’s right,” he says. “I remember.”

“What,” this time Paul’s more pressing.

“Hm?”

“What do you remember?”

George waves his wrist, his explanation. “ _You_ know,” he says, “When you used to come ’round to mine back in Liverpool?” He pauses, and seeing no sign of recognition, resumes, “We’d be dinking around on the guitar or the piano, and me mum, you know, or me dad, they’d be milling about the sitting room, tidying up the place and what not, and you used to…” He starts to laugh—chuckle, more like—“You used to be so sodding _nervous_ about singing in front of me da. Couldn’t get you to do it, hardly.” He looks up, and Paul’s just quirking his head, brow furrowed. “You don’t remember?” 

“I don’t, no.” He stops, swallows. Bites the bottom of his chapped lips. “I can’t remember the last time I was nervous about singing in front of someone.”

George leans back on the couch, yawns. He’s very tired, Paul can see. He should probably be left alone. That probably won’t happen. “Must’a been the family jus’ millin’ about that did it,” he offers (the accent, the accent is thicker when the sleep sets in). “You weren’t used to it, I guess.”

 

 

Back in the early days, John and Paul used to do this bit where one of them would start a sentence with, “Y’see the thing is—,” and the other would interrupt and say, “What’s the thing?”, and then the first would come back in with, “Here’s the thing, is that—” followed by whatever the bloody hell the thing happened to be. It always came about naturally, the genuine beginning of a thought with a tacked-on figure of speech—“Y’see the thing is”—and the quick exchange of words was ever smooth, a spot of fun in a sea of dreary parties and dreary people. George and Ringo only rolled their eyes. It baffled reporters and acquaintances alike, particularly once they realized it was no one-time occurrence.

Someone asked George once, wide-eyed, baffled, “But what does it _mean_?” (because they were always wanting to know things like that, but what does it _mean_ , Johnny, what does it _mean_ ) “Why do they do it? What _is_ the thing?”

And George looked surprised. “It isn’t about what the _thing_ is,” he told them. “It was never about the thing.”

* * *

(Y’see the thing is: )

Paul was just a poor motherless bloke from Liverpool, and George was just a wee teenager with a few too many siblings, and Ringo was just a hard-up sick kid in a hospital, and John, John was just this angry little boy whose mother didn’t want him anymore.

* * *

(What’s the thing: )

John went on this philosophy kick once, maybe ’65 or ’66 (the years kind of blur together after a while. That tends to happen more with age, apparently). He was always doing these sorts of things, always had some new toy or obsession—he’d gone with photography for a while and gotten bored, and then it was Impressionist painters (spouting, constantly spouting facts from the lives of Monet and Cézanne a minimum of ten times a day), and of course later, for a spell, he hopped onboard George’s Indian wagon—they all did, but John especially, and that of course ended just as quickly and as violently as it had begun.

Once, Ringo was stoned with a few of these slim trendy artists, _altering the entire conception of art in the modern world_ et cetera et cetera, and they were asking him with a mix of genuine interest and fashionable derision about the other Beatles, and he was telling them perhaps a bit too much. One of them, a long tall scholar with a head of too much hair, shot in, “And what’s to be made of your Lennon’s preoccupation with old moving pictures these days? Just a week ago it was Shakespeare, wasn’t it?”

And Ringo laughed and leaned back into the couch, felt warm all over, and safe. “Ach, you know John,” he said, (though they didn’t really.) “’S got the attention span of a hummingbird.” A wave of laughter circled the room, and Ringo smiled, feeling humored, loved. “The way I see it there’s only two things he’s ever liked for more than a week,” (followed by the perfunctory chants of ah, but what are they, what are they?)—Ringo smiled again. “That’s music, and Paul.”

There was a titter and a pause, and somebody asked well what about his wife then, and that’s about when Ringo realized well maybe he’d said a bit too much. (John lost interest in her years ago anyway.)

* * *

(Here’s the thing: )

During the month or so that encompassed John’s philosophy kick, Paul fucked off over to his house, watched Julian play checkers with Cynthia out on the patio while warm light poured in through the windows and he and John passed a joint back and forth on the sofa. It was against his better judgment. At the moment, he happened to have none.

“’V’yeh ever ’eard’ve Plato, mate?” John slurred, his voice always addled by weed. It saturates heavy on his tongue, makes it thick and too large in his mouth, throws sharp teeth in the way of his words. 

“What kind of question is ‘have you ever heard of Plato, mate?’” Paul answered, snorting. He passed the joint back to John, John’s fingers eager and hot to the touch. John was leaned back on the couch, his head resting into the cushions and his eyes half-lidded, legs spread. “Of fucking _course_ I’ve heard of Plato.”

“Hard to tell with you dim lot sometimes, ey?” and John tapped his knuckles against Paul’s forehead once, a motion which, in the current state of his consciousness, took quite a long moment to register. Paul blinked in response, and John handed him the joint. “Anyway, he had this angle called the world of ideas.”

“’Ve heard of it.”

“Have you now?” John shot back, hint of a smirk playing at the corner of his lips. He sat up just a bit. “Well have at it then.”

Paul shifted in his seat, his knees now angled more towards John’s and his back reclining further. The couch was rather large, and yet John seemed to take up most of it. He had that effect sometimes. “I didn’t say I studied it at Oxford, did I,” he mumbled, defensive. “Just that I’d _heard_ of it is all.”

John’s smile quirked up to one side. “All right then, Master Scholar—pass it here, would you?” Paul slipped him the joint which was waning fast. John’s lips were still half-smiling as he sucked in. “The world of ideas, then,” he said. “In which every literal being has an idealistic counterpart, see?” (rehearsed, sounds rehearsed, but it’s more than Paul knows so who’s he to really—) “A cow, and the idea of what a cow should be.” He scooted closer, his side and his elbow jabbing sharp into Paul’s torso, hot and sun-warmed and jagged. “A horse, and the idea of a horse.” There were practically miles of couch on John’s other side, and yet he was looming, he was towering, he was cornering. Paul didn’t move. “A joint—” Paul lifted up a hand and John pressed the nub of a joint between his fingers, held onto it still while Paul smoked it. Watched him, heavy eyes. “And,” he said, and his face was mere inches from Paul’s, every flick of his black-blown eyes and line of his long tall nose. _…and the idea of what a joint should be_ , Paul was waiting for him to say, but instead there was only near silence, the hum and kick of the refrigerator and the distant trill of Julian’s voice and Cynthia’s answering mumble, the space between them wavering in static, this weird, unbroken eye contact—

“—and the poor sorry bastard who thought he’d get the last hit,” John finished, cackling, and the moment was broken immediately, the joint plucked from Paul’s hand and no time allotted for recovery. They turned on the telly. Nothing was on.

* * *

(Is that: )

Paul was just a poor motherless bloke from Liverpool, and George was just a wee teenager with a few too many siblings, and Ringo was just a hard-up sick kid in a hospital, and John, John was just this angry little boy whose mother didn’t want him anymore. And all together they were the Beatles.

But wait: something happened.

Something happened somewhere along the way that caused them to transcend the model of just four lonely blokes from Liverpool; something happened that made them not John Paul George and Ringo anymore but something _bigger_ , something entirely beyond their control.

There was the Beatles, and then there was the idea of what the Beatles should be.

 

 

In all the books and magazines and newspaper articles, they like to talk about what made the bond, the Lennon-McCartney bond as strong as it was so early on. A lot of blokes—writers, documenters and the like—they stick with that elusive “chemistry,” which Paul’s found is just a way of getting out of having to explain something that is by its very nature too hard to explain. Some say it was music, which is true, of course it’s true. If music hadn’t made the bond, there wouldn’t have been the Beatles. There wouldn’t have been a lot of things.

But—but saying it was music explains only half of it, the half that had to do with…with music, obviously. Music could have been the reason for the most influential songwriting partnership of the twentieth century, but not for the far less influential friendship. So much less influential a friendship that loads of people still doubt it even existed. (That sort of thing used to frustrate Linda to no end. She’d shove magazine articles under his nose and gaze at him with wide eyes, _Have you read this, Paul? Can you believe they’re saying that you hate each other?_ And maybe he had or maybe he hadn’t, but he’d take the paper from her hands and set it down on the table, almost tenderly; hold her wrists, kiss her forehead. “Let it go, darling,” but she wouldn’t, she never would, would she. For weeks after she read those articles she’d sift through piles of old photographs, some she’d taken, some she hadn’t, and there you go, she’d pin one to the refrigerator for a week or two, some crinkled black and white memory torn at the edges Paul wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to confront every morning just reaching for his orange juice. John was always smiling in those pictures. At him. It was strange, like Linda had scrounged up the photo from another life and not another decade.)

Some say the bond was dead mothers.

Paul’s said it himself, here or there. He was more searching for an explanation as he spoke than truly acknowledging the answer, but there are always people who’ll believe him, and psychologists and psychiatrists would say such a shared traumatic experience would strengthen the bond—they’d say something like that, anyway.

But it’s—the thing here is it isn’t as though they _talked_ about it all the time. Or even hardly at all. With them—with their personalities it wasn’t exactly the kind of subject they could just whip up, oi mate, how d’you reckon having a dead mum’s affected our lives and the like. It didn’t go like that. There were no outright weeping sessions, either, except for a single night (but they were drunk and in Florida and there’d been a hurricane and thus it was acceptable. When Paul told them about it decades later, Ringo shrugged, ever the easy-going older brother, said, “Ach, well. Hurricanes do funny things to a man’s thinking,” and George nodded stoically, added, “And alcohol does even funnier things.”)

And Paul, he doesn’t remember much of what John was like immediately after…just after Julia was killed. It was so long ago, see, and the more years that go by the more Paul tends to block out the other sides of John, the darker sides. He’s a positive fellow. He likes to remember the good things. He likes to keep John happy in his mind.

* * *

There was this—this time, a few months after Julia’s death and just as John was starting to heal (and maybe that’s why Paul remembers it most: the healing), that the two of them were mucking about downtown, about to head into this little record shop again when they ran into an old acquaintance coming out of the store. Eddie or Davey or something. _’Ey lads, what’re y’up to_ and such and such, and then Eddie or Davey or what have you turns to Paul and goes, “And how’s your mother gettin’ along, then?”

It’d been longer for Paul than for John, and he was used to the rote answers by now, _ah, well, actually, ’s been three years or so, but…_ And Eddie or Davey was caught off guard, eyebrows shoot up and mouth spouts off apologies. Felt terribly awkward, probably. Tried to alleviate some of the awkwardness by turning to John, asking him the exact same question, getting the exact same answer.

“My goodness,” he said. “Well, that’s—that’s…” He cleared his throat. Paul felt almost sorry for the poor fellow. “My goodness.”

It wasn’t much longer before goodbyes were exchanged, tense and thoroughly uncomfortable, and John and Paul stepped into the shop in total silence. Branched off from one another and wandered the aisles, fingers tracing over vinyl and cardboard covers, rifling blankly through wooden boxes. They weaved back together in the back of the store.

“Found the Chuck Berry I was missing,” John said flatly, holding it up.

“Oh,” said Paul. “That’s good.” And for a moment they stood there silently, the sound of the clerk ringing up some customer at the front, ding of the cash register, distant small talk, and this pressing silence, until John cleared his throat. Tilted his head just a little bit. Smiled, halfway.

“That was—”

“Yeah,” said Paul, and he started to laugh. John chuckled, this low-throated cackle of a laugh. (It was genuine, though—it was genuine. And it felt like it hadn’t been for a while.) “Yeah.”

“Poor bloke never knew what hit him,” John said. His eyes were crinkling at the edges, lit up across the center. “Two dead mothers, Cor blimey.”

The clerk rang up the Chuck Berry album and John leaned against the counter still smiling. “Jesus, Paulie,” he grinned, “I swear if anyone else were laughing right about now, I’d pop ’em a good one.” And Paul had no doubt he meant it.

 

 

**[January, 1999]**

Paul would like to be able to pretend that it was easy, that they could laugh at anything. He would like to rely on his handy-dandy selective memory when it comes to tragedy—he would like only to remember Linda bright-eyed and grinning on the day she married him and not exhausted and weary and sick; and he would like only to remember George as a little kid with spider limbs sitting next to him on the bus and not as an angry twenty-five-year-old too young to be in a band this big, too close to punching John for comfort; and he would like only to remember Ringo as the big-nosed newcomer shrugging off loud public insults with a joke and not as the—the drunk, the bitter guy who slapped his wife around, quit the band. 

He would like, see, he would like only to remember the John in the record shop who tilted his head and said it’s only okay for us to laugh, Paulie, just us, and not the John who spent months dropping acid on the couch in front of the telly, taking trips to an empty wonderland in front of his five-year-old son, who spent an entire Lost Weekend wandering into nothingness with heroin in his back pocket, who spat into a microphone in a cold recording studio, _yeah, how do you sleep at night._ It seems to him John was hell-bent on unhappiness from the beginning, from their fucking _childhood_ he was hell-bent on it.

And he says this, he says this to George—

“I hate this notion, really,” bent over his knees, picking at his fingernails, “that a musician’s got to suffer for his art. It’s absurd.” He glances up, hesitant. “You and John’ve always insisted on being so—so _sad_ , so depressed all the time. Ever since the beginning you’ve been that way.”

George opens his mouth, closes it again. He waits a moment, then, “But Paul,” he says, and his eyebrows go up and he looks genuinely surprised, still so awake for one in the morning and hours spent sprawled across one couch—“I guess John, you know, he might’ve been a bit that way when we were younger. And Ringo’s childhood was terrible, just shite…all those hospitals. But me?” He shrugs, almost, lifts his lips. “I had both my parents. I had my brothers, I had Louise.” He shifts his legs a little, throws an arm across the back of the empty couch. “If it’s childhood you’re on about here, Paul, I mean…” Shrugs again. “I was really the only happy one.” He stares at Paul head-on, meets his eyes now. (George got good at that after the stuff in India—the eye-contact thing. It threw Paul off for a few months then, first because with George it’d always been ducked heads and slipped-in words, second because he realized he’d only ever _really_ stared at John for very long, and third because he realized it’d been a long time since even _that_ had happened. Perhaps he missed it. Perhaps he didn’t. Hard to remember now.) “Paul,” George says, “sometimes you were a sad kid, too.”

 

 

Paul would like to look back on the year he was fourteen and remember every day that he was fine and he was happy and he was good, and not every day that he wasn’t. He would like to remember every second of his life that way.

There’s a problem there, though, it’s that—there were days that he wasn’t okay, and times where the things John said would really get to him, you know, not because of the words themselves so much but because of the _history_ , this seventeen-year-old boy who used to fall asleep in my bed calling me a cunt on a brand new record, and there was a morning Paul woke up to his own stifled breath in a cold bed, a pillow at his mouth and no air in his lungs and there was a moment, a real moment there where he thought, _do I really want to pull away?_ Do I really want to do this, is what he meant. A real moment.

And his brother called him up on the phone during one of those months, those endless months filled with endless days that bled into each other like paint on John’s blank canvases and the gray afternoons that dragged on and on until everything was just a blur of alcohol and too much sleep—his brother called and he ended up saying, Mike ended up saying to him, “It was just a band.” Three more times, like he was tired: “It was just a band, it was just a band, it was just a band.”

But the thing is, is that:

The Beatles transcended the model of just four lonely blokes from Liverpool; became something bigger, something higher, something entirely beyond their control. 

He was so young when this all started. He was so young when it ended, too. 

It was everything to him.

 

 

**[November, 2012]**

Some weekends—every few months or so, when they can work it out with their schedules—Paul goes out to dinner with Dave, someplace fancy in New York or L.A. that Dave doesn’t particularly like, but is willing to put up with. Dave’s willing to put up with a lot.

Dinners with Dave Grohl amuse Paul for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Dave is amusing. It’s interesting, first off, that he is to Dave what Elvis was to him, that every time they get together Dave’s biting back the multitude of “oh my gods” he so prolifically employs, that he is Dave’s childhood _idol_ —that they’re _friends_ now. Paul can’t imagine he would be half as laid-back if he and Elvis went to dinner twice a year. And then there’s this dichotomy that’s rather fun, the fact that while _his_ first big shows involved crooning into a microphone with a sugar-sweet smile and fastening up the top button of his suit before he went onstage, Dave’s included putting on bras some teenage punk miscreant tossed up onstage and attempting to destroy his drum-set in front of four hundred people by beating it with an amplifier. (“It’s a rather entertaining thought, if you think about it,” Paul’s said before, to mystified responses.)

The music in these sorts of restaurants is always something smooth and calming, harp or soft jazz piano in the corner, and every time they meet, Dave gestures crudely to the pianist, grimaces and shakes his head, laughs at himself as they scrape back their seats.

“I know I’m getting old,” he says, “but I’m not _that_ old yet.”

“I am,” Paul answers, which makes Dave laugh, loud, unapologetic. He gets some looks.

“Yeah, well,” he goes on, tucking his long hair behind his ears, “the seventeen-year-old dropout in me who like, nearly screamed out a lung onstage is still scratching at the door going, ‘the fuck are you doing listening to this shit, dude?’” 

“I was a dropout too, if you remember,” Paul smiles. “Younger than you were, too, I seem to recall.”

“Yeah, but the screaming-out-a-lung part,” Dave reminds him, pointing a finger. “I got you there.”

“You got me there,” Paul agrees, and their drinks come.

They talk about everything, from musicians who come from poverty to their Grammy performance with Bruce to Lorne Michaels to techno music to the Obamas, and Paul says, he says one time after a bit too much wine and a friendly lull of silence, “You know I’ve been thinking a bit lately,” and he swallows, “about John’s last couple of years.” He picks up his wineglass, sets it down again. Toys with the cloth napkin in his lap. “And it gets to me, you know…” (Clears his throat.) “How miserable he made himself.” Paul tugs on the tablecloth, the white lace end of it—the kind of tablecloth Dave makes fun of, John would hate. “The heroin and the acid and the, the… ‘the artist suffers for his art,’ that stuff.” He rubs the lace between two fingers, tries not to move his eyes. “It drives me mad, you know.”

It goes silent for a minute, just the soft jazz backdrop, and then Dave clears his throat. Paul glances up once, wary, then back down. A moment passes—the music plays on in the restaurant—and Dave says, “Listen, I didn’t know—I didn’t know John, so I can’t say…” He trails off and Paul lets him, doesn’t interrupt. “I’m just—I mean from what I’ve heard and read and, you know, whatever… It doesn’t seem… I mean—” He clears his throat again, looks down as Paul looks up. “He had his wife who he loved, and he had his son who he loved, and he started making music again and he…he… It doesn’t seem like he was miserable, actually.” Paul watches him, watches him poke at his cold pasta with his fancy fork—Dave’s got a lot of youthfulness to him, a lot of kid in him, and Paul likes that—and then he looks up, suddenly, his face set into something like determination, like he’s just remembered something he has to do and he’s about to do it.

“Look,” he says, and his voice drops suddenly to a completely different level, tonally softer and down low, like anyone in this restaurant could really hear them. He stares at Paul, blank-faced but imploring, somehow—says, “I knew someone once who was really, really unhappy,” and it’s funny, really, it’s funny all these obvious parallels to draw (not like they hadn’t drawn them, not like they hadn’t realized them on their own, it’d be impossible not to), but the things they have in common are the very things they don’t talk about, can’t talk about. It’s been a lot longer for Paul than it has for Dave. He supposes, in a lot of ways, Dave has it worse. “John was not like that,” Dave says to him, and it’s so obvious, really, (the crack in his voice, the quiver at the end of his sentence), just who he’s talking about. But Paul’s willing to let it slide this time.

 

 

**[January, 1999]**

Paul and George watch the sun rise in silence, pale yellow lifting over the hillside out the window and slowly lighting up the room, shadows fleeing, birds chirping, all of it, all of that. It’s rather beautiful. There is nothing to be said, no music that needs playing and no song that needs singing—George’s guitar is sideways on the ground. It’s a sunrise. There’s still room for that.

Olivia comes downstairs just as they’re standing up, old joints creaking and lungs groaning, clinging to their knees and stretching their arms above their heads and yawning. They’ve been sitting, they’ve been seated for so long.

“Did you keep him up all night?” Olivia asks Paul, slight smile with her hands on her hips. “Bad influence,” and she clicks her tongue. Paul’s too tired for a witty response, so he just grins at her, grins at George and grins out the window. God, the windows in here are giant. You can really see the sun.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” George offers, gesturing with his hand and starting forward—slow, jerking. “I ought to make abso-fuckin’-lutely sure you get out of me house, for Christ’s sake.”

“George!” Olivia swats his arm. He only smiles, lit up, warm. Golden.

In the doorway George leans against the frame with the door open, Paul on the front step with his hands on his hips. He squints up at the sun, the trees, eyes getting used to the light. Then he turns to George. Can’t help but smile just looking at him, really. It’s gotten to that point now—that point where he can’t tell the new from the old. 

“You gonna be all right, mate?” he wonders, slapping a hand down on his arm, clinging to George tight—the solid _there_ ness of his arm. He didn’t used to do that. Touching is good.

“Soon as you get out o’ here I’ll be just fine and dandy, actually,” George drawls, the slow molasses drag of an old smile ticking up the corners of his mouth.

“All right, all right, I get the message,” Paul laughs, stepping onto the second stair, the light. He turns back over his shoulder and George is in the doorway still, one elbow resting on the hinges. He’s smiling, distant. Maybe a little bit sad. Or maybe not. “I’ll see you around, all right then, Georgie?”

George takes a minute; shifts a little and smiles soft. “Yeah,” he says. “See you ’round, Paulie.” Paul walks out a few more steps and George calls after him, “I better!”

Paul doesn’t turn around, just waves a hand behind him and laughs, the muscles in his face caught up in something he can’t quite describe, something that involves a lot of thinking of Linda and of George and Ringo and of John, a web, a tangle of family and happiness and regrets and unfairness and an empty ache and _love_ , that’s it. His lips turned up in a smile. His eyes creased into corners. He isn’t sure if the door’s already closed when he says, “You will.”

Paul tilts his head up as the sun is rising. The sky is blue for miles ahead. It’s going to be a beautiful day.

**Author's Note:**

> for more notes and quotes to help comprehend this story further, see [here](http://portions-forfox.livejournal.com/51780.html).


End file.
